Quote:
Originally Posted by davis449
I've been in IT for 15 years. I believe everyone in here's advice about going for A+ training and certification is solid. ItsHectic gives good advice, too, but if you're not quite at that level, I would start more basic. I think what he's suggesting is kinda overkill if you have very little experience. That said, NOTHING replaces experience, so I feel you should get your hands dirty. Time to build one of your own or, at the very least, buy a cheap used one and start loading some operating systems and getting the feel for how everything hardware and software goes together. The man who mentored me at 17 gave me an assignment right off the bat the first week I was under him during my 2 year internship. He gave me 1 work week to completely disassemble and reassemble a PC as well as produce a complete with drivers Windows NT Workstation 4.0 SP 6a install (no plug n play on that bad boy) while simultaneously doing grunt work as assigned. I could ask him questions along the way when he had time to answer them. That type of learning taught me more over my career than both my degrees EVER did\could. Good luck and PM me if you want more info. or just want to ask questions. I'm alway happy to help.
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That's awesome someone was able to provide you with that opportunity at a young age. I also got my start in the IT world that way. It was my first job and I was still in high school at the time. 15 years old if I recall correctly. The store owner said I had to earn the ability to build PCs by doing all the manual labor around the shop (ie cleaning, loading stock, etc.). After a couple of months, he gained confidence that I had a good work ethic and trusted me with PC builds. So that's when the training began. I started building the old PC/XT compatible computers running on the old 8088 chips. I had to manually populate the memory on the system boards with individual DRAM chips, and install hard drives which were based off of RLL and MFM to ESDI and then IDE started to hit the market. I was blessed to see the evolution of the PC industry right in front of my eyes from IBM being the only game in town to the rise of AST, Leading Edge, Kaypro, Compaq, Hyundai...and also the fall of some of these companies. Man I feel old. Very valuable experience which lead me to ultimately make my current living as a Network Engineering professional.
The advice by others to buy a book is solid. You should get a good foundation by learning the fundamentals. At the end of the day, there really isn't much magical with PC building and troubleshooting once you have the basics down. Troubleshooting PCs is no longer what it was back when I doing it in the shop. When something is amiss, the tech troubleshoots the problem typically by seeing what the issue is then narrowing down the issue to a specific subsystem of the PC. There are diagnostic tools out which do a very good job of checking out the various components of a PC and many of them are freely available from the manufacturer. If a component is deemed to be suspect, that component just gets replaced and you move on. With the commodity nature of PCs, any time spent on troubleshooting is money lost. Shops that can turn around a PC the quickest stand to make the most money as they can move on to other problem PCs. These shops will tend to have a huge stock of compatible replacement parts on hand to do the repair/diagnostic work.
The big money is in services where specialized skills are needed such as being able to build/troubleshoot servers or installing/troubleshooting networks. I would say once you get you get established with the fundamentals of PCs, I would highly pursue getting well versed with networking...particularly wireless. Everything is going to be networked in some fashion and the trend isn't going to die down at all. Someone who can properly design, configure, and implement a wireless network is going to be able to write their own ticket. And this isn't just about being able to throw up a simple Linksys wireless router. There's a lot more to wireless than many people are aware of.